Hi there... My name is Marcos Daniel Marado Torres, but I'm often known in the Internet by the handle of Mind Booster Noori.I was born in the Yule day of 1982 in Lamego - Portugal. I'm an Informatics Engineer since July of 2005.

8.11.06

So, you've been thinking about "what the hell is this" with the agreement between Novell and Microsoft, and you've called me and others who think that this agreement is bad as "zealots", "fundamentalists" or both. Well, we all needed more details to dismiss the other side's oppinion, right? Now we have it: the SEC report is out there, and it tell us more (yet not everything) about this "patent agreement". One big question here was about Novell's obligations under Section 7 of the GPL: they have GPL'd code in SuSE Linux, and yet are making an agreement on patents and such on code that isn't theirs. On that, their FAQ says that "We have not agreed with Microsoft to any condition that would contradict the conditions of the GPL and we are in full compliance.". Yet, he end users are also licensees, according to the GPL license! So, when we read in the SEC report that "Under the Patent Cooperation Agreement, Microsoft commits to a covenant not to assert its patents against Novell's end-user customers for their use of Novell products and services for which Novell receives revenue directly or indirectly from such customers, with certain exceptions, while Novell commits to a covenant not to assert its patents against Microsoft's end-user customers for their use of Microsoft products and services for which Microsoft receives revenue directly or indirectly from such customers, with certain exceptions." ... What does this mean? Well, it means, if you translate it bit by bit,

Another big problem with this whole "this is not a licence, this is an agreement on patents" absurd thing that they're using to circumvent the laws that would set this as illegal as it obviously should be, is that, as you can see in the quote before, the patents are all covered, from both Novell and Microsoft, but "with certain exceptions". Since that they want that, if someone's to be sues is the Novell costumer, I have to ask: how can a Novell costumer know if they're INTO the certain exception? When they get their ass sued? Well, that's easy, avoid SUSE (specially the patent-clumbered SLES) and start using another distro.